Thursday, September 25, 2014

The lazy couple's dinner...

It was one of those days, where your stomach craves good, home cooked, exotic food, but your mind and body are in no mood to indulge the stomach - the eternal tussle.
So they reached a compromise - a lazy dinner of leftovers and soup.
Leftovers because, well, you have to get rid of them sometime and soup because i love it and Sagar's down with a flu...but more because i love soups!

So this is our dinner -
1. Celery and spring onion soup, with mushroom (sounds so cool, doesn't it?)
2. Roti wrap ( I don't know what else to call it, but it is just that - lots of stuffing put in the leftover roti and wrapped and gobbled!)

This recipe follows on the lines of Tarla Dalal's cream of celery soup, though i have tweaked it a little to include mushrooms and spring onions and make my soup a little more liquid, as opposed to the thick soup mentioned in the recipe!

Serves : 1 person who loves soup and 1 person who is made to have one bowl (so 3 bowls comfortably!)

Time: 25 minutes (if your husband does not insist on helping you, longer if he does :) )

1. Heat the butter in a vessel
2. Add Onion and brown ( add potato here if you do not have a boiled one, already)
3. Add celery stalks and cook for about 3 minutes on a medium flame
4. Add spring onions and potato and cook for 2 minutes
5. Add 1.5 cups of water and simmer for 8 minutes. (add 1 cup water if you like your soup thick)
6. Turn off the gas and let cool

If following recipes visually is more your style, don't confuse celery with spring onions. Celery goes in first

7. Once cooled, or if you want to use your time efficiently (which i of course did), when the mixture is cooling, take a pan and a very tiny bit of oil to it, once hot, saute the mushrooms in it and add soy sauce to the mushrooms. Let the mushrooms and soy sauce accept each other and merge, then turn the pan off and let it rest.

Mushrooms in the pan

8. Once cooled, add the onion-potato-spring onion-celery mixture to a blender and blend till smooth.
9. Strain the mixture. Again do this only if you want your soup to be very very smooth. If you like a bit of texture, no need to strain.
10. Heat up the original vessel, add the milk and flour mixture to the strained or not strained veggies mixture and let it come to a boil on a medium flame
11. Add salt, pepper and simmer for 10 mins. Keep stirring continuously at this point.
If you don't do this step - something bad will happen to you!!!
Umm...your flour will stick to the bottom of the pan and you will not have a very nice soup..that's bad enough!

Before serving, put in the soy sauteed mushrooms and you are done!

The Roti Wrap
This recipe takes its inspiration from a subway Sub - basically putitng all healthy (leftover) veggies in bread (roti, in this case), generous topping of cheese, mayo or any other dressing and makes for messy eating!

Method:
1. Heat oil in a pan. Add the onion and garlic to it.
2. Saute till the onions become translucent.
3. Add baby corn / corn if you like and saute for 2 minutes
4. Add all colored peppers and saute for another 3 - 4 minutes.
5. Add the mushrooms and stir.
6. Add salt and pepper. (be careful with the amount of salt, we are also going to add salt to the egg that is going to coat the roti).

Follow the pictures

7. Now just take it off the pan and keep neatly with the rest of the ingredients :)

Visualizing neatness

8. Take 2 eggs and whisk them, add salt and pepper

How cute is this silicon blue whisk?

9. Put the original pan up on heat and spread some butter / olive oil.
10. Dip your roti in the eggs, coat it well on both sides and put on the pan.
11. Depending on how crisp you enjoy your wrap, flip the roti and on the flipped side put in the filling mixture.
12. Top with mayo and cheese and jalapenos and some herbs if you like.